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Sometimes people change their mind, especially when new evidence comes to light! For example, in the medical profession, the process of consent stays open right until the operation is about to take place. It would be ludicrous to tell someone they have to go through with a leg amputation, even after it’s been discovered that their leg is in fact healthy and savable, simply because the consent form is signed! I think Brexit feels like that, except in our case, we are the leg and we’re about to cut off the body to which we are joined! Or we could compare it to a couple being forced to go through with a divorce, with all the pain involved, even after they rediscover that they are really great together, have believed lies about each other, and will both be worse off without each other. Yes – they may have some things to work through and they may need to totally reimagine their relationship, but to force the divorce through just because they were going through a rough patch, might be hugely regretful. I think Brexit feels like that – a very sad outcome to what could have been a totally different kind of conversation.

Yes, I accept that there are things about the EU which have made many across the UK find it difficult to want to stay in a relationship with her. But we’ve been led to believe some things about Europe which are wholly untrue and our vision got really clouded. When we step back and recognise all the good things about the relationship, knowing that it isn’t perfect and would still need a lot of work; mediating a reimagined future is so much more preferable than what a divorce is going to mean. And sometimes, it’s only after you call something off that you begin to realise that it isn’t a break-up that you want, it’s just a different kind of relationship. We are literally about to make an unbelievably terrible mistake, but it’s not too late to change our minds.

Let’s be honest, through the unraveling scandal of Cambridge Analytica et al. we now know that Brexit was NOT the result of a “democratic process”, and the idea that we now can’t change our minds, (even though the evidence is clear of how bad it will be), is beyond ludicrous. Yes, it’s true, we were told it would be a once in a lifetime vote, and that not leaving the EU will break people’s trust in our political system – but last time I looked, there wasn’t loads of faith in it anyway! The leave campaign broke the law in terms of what they spent, told many lies, and hard though it is for us to face up to, used immorally targeted psychological manipulation to get the vote they wanted, driven by hyper-nationalist media moguls. And so NO, we don’t actually have to take the result and live with the dire consequences. It is time to stop this madness, say sorry to our European friends and renegotiate a New European Union that works for everybody. Clearly there are some huge problems, which is why we are seeing the rise of the far right across the continent. Many people feel un-listened to. Europe has forgotten how to create a positive story of the future and so we are retreating into narratives of fear and separation. But, rather than leave, what we need to do is come together with a bolder and more positive dream of what it means to be in Union together and then we can begin to face up to some of the really complex issues we face at a global level.

We’ve been worried that being part of the Union means that we are losing our own national identity. It doesn’t mean that at all! Have you seen the Dutch fans at a football match?! When I married my wife, I was still me, she was still her, but we also became something new together! The EU really doesn’t limit our sense of individual nationhood, rather it expands our sense of partnership! We’ve believed that that the union prevents our ability to make good and sensible laws, but this simply isn’t true! Rather, the EU upholds human rights and helps us to embrace ‘otherness’. Europe and the European Union is extraordinarily amazing, but it absolutely needs to modernise, change and embrace the positive new power movements which are emerging. In the bloodiest continent on the planet, we have managed to live at peace with each other for over 70 years, and more than that to have become friends with each other.

Compared to many nations in Europe, we are not as amazing as we might like to believe. We have one of the highest levels of poverty, some of the least happy people, the widest inequality gaps by an absolute mile and some of the lowest spending on public services. We have the highest property prices and rents in Europe and significantly declining productivity. To top it all, we have the worst pension deal. This is not the fault of the EU, but of the economic systems we have championed but which the rest of Europe have been more careful about monitoring.

So, leaving the European Union will help us how? £350 million extra a week for the NHS
or social care, or education, or policing? Nope. A better deal in life for those living in our most economically deprived areas? No again. Will we be safer? The police chiefs tell us not. Will our borders be more secure so that we can control all the immigration that we are told is the root of all our problems? Well no, and although immigration is a complex issue, Brexit is not the answer to it and we need to resist a rhetoric of fear, division and hate. . Might we create division across a well-healed Irish border? Yes. Will we potentially lose loads of manufacturing jobs across the North? Yes (just look at the new manufacturing deal Japan have struck with the EU). Will many of our businesses suffer heavy losses? Yes. Will the NHS struggle to recruit workers when our workforce is already hugely overstretched? Yes. Are there likely to be food shortages and will food become more expensive? Yes. Are we more likely to see the break up of the UK? Yes – and what of our great sovereignty then?! England is a very small place on its own! We need to wake up!

I know, we had a referendum and the ‘remoaners’ lost. But we are all about to lose so much more if we actually go through with this madness. We don’t just need a people’s vote, we need some humility and some hope that we can restore the damage we have done to our friends across the continent and together face the huge complexities in front of us over this next century – climate change, the refugee crisis, the plastic in our seas, water shortages and so much more. We cannot face these things alone as isolated nation states, but together, in union, we can! So, enough with Brexit! Let’s stop this now and find a new way forward together. #togetherwecan

In this blog, I am exploring how traditional views of God have dominated western thinking about the nature of power, sovereignty and systems. I am drawing heavily on three brillaint thinkers: Thomas Jay Oord and his book ‘The Uncontrolling Love of God’, Brad Jersak and his book ‘A More Christlike God’ and my great friend Roger Haydon Mitchell and his book ‘Church, Gospel and Empire.’

I agree with Richard Dawkins that there is an utter God delusion. But I disagree with him utterly about the nature of that delusion, which I will come on to. So much of Western thought has been shaped by “Christianity”, or perhaps more accurately, “Christendom”, and has very little to do with the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The dominant story, as we have it now, took it’s shape in the fourth century, under the partnership of the Emperor Constantine, and a theologian by the name of Eusebius. At this particular point in history, the message of Christianity was spreading like wild-fire throughout the Roman Empire and beyond. It very much challenged the status quo and the power dynamics of the Empire, calling for people to change the way they thought about who God is (a loving father, not a dominant emperor), to consider all people equal, to undo economic oppression and follow the radical way of love, partnering with God for reconciliation, healing and peace. This view of God didn’t suit the Emperor, nor the philosophy of Empire.

This allowed an understanding to develop that God is actually quite like a Sovereign Emperor who rules the whole world, a God very much like the one Richard Dawkins describes in his famous book – and why would anyone believe in a “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” God like that?! No thanks! But this is the kind of God that Empires depend on. This is the kind of God that those with power through the centuries purported God to be like in order to hold onto their own power, making Jesus the great warrior and God the threatening one to be feared. Constantine understood that harnessing the message of Christianity gave him more control. The church leaders understood that partnering with the empire would mean greater safety and prosperity for themselves.

But God is not at all like the caricature painted by Dawkins. As Jesus said, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” God is exactly like Jesus. He is the antithesis of a dominant Emperor. He is a loving, kind, creative, healing, perfect Father, who rather than anihilating us for our rebellion, allows himself to be utterly misunderstood and seemingly defeated by the might of Empire, only to overcome it through love, breaking forever, the power of all that stops us being truly human and inaugurating a new way for humanity – what some of us now call kenarchy, but more traditionally referred to as the Kingdom of God (a term which now has so many other difficulties that it needs reinterpreting).

If God is exactly like Jesus, then he is essentially kenotic, in other words, he is first and foremost about self-giving, others-empowering love, and therefore he cannot be like the God caricatured by Richard Dawkins, nor can he be a fluffy grandpa, a doting dad, a domineering dictator or an amalgamation of all of these, dressed up as Santa Claus. That means that the Christian scriptures have to be wrestled with and studied carefully with this lens firmly in tact. It also utterly changes the whole idea that Christianity could ever become a “state-religion”, uphold the divine right of kings (or indeed presidents/republics etc that behave in the same ways), or the support the propping up of political ideologies that lead to the oppression of the poor, marginalisation of the other or rejection of any person based on any part of their identity.

For me, the Gospel narrative is not that God made the whole world and we then messed it up, offended his sovereignty and so he needed someone to die in our place so that his wrath could be appeased. No, the narrative is something far more profound and beautiful. Brian Zahnd explains is beautifully in his ‘gospel in chairs’. My faith lies in a God who invested himself in the evolutionary process, creating a world of order and randomness in which human beings emerged, in his image, able to choose how we would relate to God, each other and the environment in which we find ourselves. But rather than choose this way of self emptying, others empowering love, we have time and again made God in our own image of power and self-centred free will. In doing so, we have wrought destruction to ourselves, to one another, to those weaker than ourselves and to the ecological systems in which we live, move and have our being. And this is why we have different versions of God painted through the pages of scripture in our desire to understand what God is like – and we must wrestle with ourselves as we read. What do our interpretations of the bible teach us about ourselves? What kind of God are we looking for?

We had so misunderstood and misaligned our very expectations of what God is like, that he came as a human being, especially as a male, as maleness needs utter redemption from the stereotypes we have created, somehow encapsulating the male and female in one body.

The incarnation is therefore not about God changing his mind about humanity, but about giving humanity the chance to change its mind about who he is and what he is like. This human Jesus, stood at the pinnacle of the Roman Empire, proclaiming himself the son of God in direct contrast to the empires of the day. But humanity did not like this image of God and so we killed him. But in his death, he took upon himself all that is broken in us and in our world and nullified its power, overcoming death through his endless, self emptying, others empowering love, and released the potential for new hope, creation and life. To me, this is the story of salvation, that out of our own selfishness, we can be re-activated into a place of love, in which we are free to choose to benefit others ahead of ourselves and bring this shalom or wellness to those around us, sometimes seeing miracles and sometimes not, because although God is good and more powerful than any other force or being, shit still happens; and because he is essentially kenotic, he is therefore unable to just intervene whenever he feels like it. He is unable to be untrue to his nature and in Him an uncontrolling love comes first.

In the end, if you want to believe in a God who is first of all omnipotent, ie limitless in his power, you can find that kind of God in the bible. It’s a bit like needing a dominating form of government, and world order in which you are free, until you challenge the Sovereign. When this happens, the nice, good, caring government has behind it the immense threat of the nuclear bomb, which I suppose you could liken to hell. Our view of leadership, our view of how government should behave, our view of the role of the state is actually pretty messed up, and I am arguing that it is messed up because it was shaped by a very warped view of God, who mostly cares for us, but has the great threat of eternal punishment for those who don’t believe quite correctly. That is not to say that all will be part of a heavenly future, but I would say that those who pursue the way of love are actually following the way of Jesus far more than those who follow the way of their version of the truth. The truth will set us free, but the truth is: (as Belinda Carlisle – that great theologan told us) in heaven, love comes first!! So when people pray the Lord’s prayer – ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ – this looks very little like our current practices of government or nation states and the ways they behave in the earth.

But if self-giving, others-empowering love is the ESSENTIAL nature of God, then this must change the way we understand everything. The glory of God is not found in might, power, dominion and sovereignty. No, it is found in his cruciform nature. And if the earth can be filled with the glory of God rather than the ‘glory of empire’, where love is the antidote to fear, joy the antedote to debt, goodness the antedote to control through law and peace the antedote to violence, then together we might begin to taste a little bit of heaven.

How might we live and organise ourselves differently? How might we live politically? How might we shape economics? How might we heal and educate? How might we care for each other and the environment? How might nations relate to one another if love and not autonomous power comes first? There is a revolution much more profound than the violent overthrows of the past. It is the revolution of love.

I would want to legislate Proportional Representation for a fairer reflection of the political will of the people, with coalitions becoming the norm, leading to a more collaborative and conciliatory form of politics, involving real engagement with and empowerment of local people in their communities.

Political conversations in local communities will mean that politicians and public servants do not come up with good ideas and “do things to people”, but rather learn to form environments of participatory leadership where co-commissioning becomes the norm. “No decision about me, without me, is for me.” (Leeds Poverty Truth Challenge). This is part of the new politics we need.

Sovereignty can be understood in several ways. From my perspective there are two competing narratives that frame the debate. Sovereignty can be the right to self-govern, to be in charge of our own future and rule in such a way to ensure that this happens – that is to insist that our own freedoms matter the most and we may have to suspend the freedom of others to ensure this happens. The alternative view of freedom is rooted in the idea of ‘essential kenosis’, i.e. that true sovereignty is not the domination of the other, but a self-giving, others-empowering love. I would see this latter definition of Sovereignty to be the basis of a more human kind of leadership. Leadership is something which is from among, rather than something which is lorded over others.

I would continue with town and county councils run on this basis, with two nationally elected houses, one based in the north and the other in the south.

Economy

I would start with the breaking up of banks into smaller, regional units, encouraging a multiplicity of options, especially encouraging credit unions and cooperatives. This is a well thought through idea of what to do with RBS, as championed by the New Economics Foundation. This will ensure local lending for local people, businesses and initiatives which will lead to a more sustainable system, more similar to the German or Danish model, both of which have ridden financial storms more easily than those where larger and centralised banks are allowed to dominate the market.

there needs to be a recognition that in all of economic history that we know of, only 3 countries have ever been in surplus and each case this was in a very unusual circumstance and for a short time. The obsession with balancing the books is a nonsense. (A national economy is nothing at all like a household! For instance, we do not have a bank in our back gardens that can print money, nor do we have rich friends living with us, to whom we give special privileges whilst making others work for very little pay, refusing to help them out, but rather telling them they need to have better aspirations and work harder).

A fair society involves creating local environments in which people can work and work pays well, so that a hard days work does not still leave someone unable to afford food, shelter and warmth. A fair society means that when you are unable to work or go through a time of hardship, you will be cared for appropriately. We would encourage the formation and strengthening of unions on this basis.

We need an economy that does not allow organisations to have their headquarters in the UK, but put their profits into other nations, whilst avoiding their fair share of taxation. The UK has many reasons to attract companies here, other than low tax rates and if companies wish to hold the UK to ransom, they can go elsewhere. Instead we will build relationships with those companies that will pay a fair and living wage, ensuring a fair share of profits and contribute to the wellbeing of the economy. Trickle down neoliberalism is failing the vast majority of people, and so we will develop this new economy together.

110 years ago last weekend, there was a phenomenon that occurred at Azusa Street, Los Angeles, which saw the birth of the Christian Pentecostal movement and forever changed the face of global christianity and society as a whole. In the gatherings and prayer meetings that happened during this time, many people encountered the egalitarian love of God and were utterly transformed by it. In a day and age in which there was still an utter domination of Black men and women by Whites and the general degradation of women of all colours and backgrounds, something incredible unravelled. Suddenly, men and women, blacks and whites found themselves to be equally loved, equally honoured and equally transformed. Sadly, within just a couple of years, much of this free and radical move of God, this outpouring of the Holy Spirit, had become commodified and controlled with the separation of men and women, black and white as entrenched as ever.

What we can recognise, however, is that something had been birthed that was unstoppable. It is without doubt, that one can trace this awakening force all the way through to the bravery of Rosa Parks and the peace-fuelled dream of Martin Luther King. But, I want to argue that between the early 20th century and the time of the Civil Rights Movement, a virus had infected the movement that has ultimately led to it being ineffectual in creating a truly egalitarian society.

In a recent blog I wrote on Christmas, I stated that the Christmas story is not about God changing his mind about humanity, but about humanity reconfiguring its understanding of who God is. So, it was with Azusa Street. The movement of God in the earth, what some people term ‘the river of God’, flows to “bring down rulers from their thrones and exalt those who are humble”, or to “bring the mountains low and raise the valleys up”, creating an equal playing field for humanity. To state this even more clearly: There is a whole new way for humanity to walk in together, which is utterly different from the status quo, where we move from a place in which the power and wealth is held by the few, to a ‘new creation’ of egalitarian grace for all. The Azusa Street ‘awakening’ was not given so that more and more Christians could sing more and more songs for longer and have ever more wonderful experiences. No, it was to begin something that could change the whole of society and put right age-long injustices.

In the flow from Azusa Street into the Civil Rights Movement, something precious was lost and a distortion took place. Azusa Street offered a new way for humanity, a partnership between kenosis and ecstasy. However, a misapplied understanding of Sovereignty through a leadership of domination and control, meant that rather than creating a new dance, to which all could be invited, it was believed that it was only through the positions of power that one could affect change. So, the contemporary critics of MLK may have been onto something when they said that he should not be knocking on the door of power in order to be part of the white man’s game. Rather, the movement could have found a new way of being that they invited all, including the powerful to join in with.

If we take the journey right through from Azusa Street to Obama, even with a black President, the problem still remains. So much hope rested on one man. ‘Yes We Can!’ has become ‘Oh no you couldn’t’. Not because Obama isn’t brilliant (I think he was ace in many ways). Not because his motives were wrong. Not even because he was naive. No, the truth is that real change doesn’t happen from the top. The positions of power are incapable of making the changes that many long to see. Generally the positions are filled with good people, but they find that the power they thought they might have is utterly impotent. They are actually powerless to do the very thing they were elected to the office to do! Otherwise, we would have implementation of Obamacare, and many other injustices put right…..only we are seeing the very opposite of this occur on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is the powers that have to shift and the processes that need to change. The systems are so strong and built on such endemic injustice, violence and control, that they simply cannot shift their ground. If people movements try to get ‘the right people’ into positions of power in the hope that they will bring some kind of salvation, they will be sorely disappointed. We cannot knock on the doors of power to try to gain that power. We must fundamentally see a power shift and redistribution. This requires an entirely different kind of culture and an entirely new politics. It is the movements that must help those in power to make the shift into the new future we are all longing for, rendering the current power structures null and void.

We are hearing a lot about ‘sovereignty’ these days, especially in the current debate about Europe. We are particularly told by the ‘brexit’ campaign that leaving Europe will give us our ‘Sovereignty’ back as a nation. We will be able to make our own laws and do things the way we want them to be done. And yet sovereignty usually means the empowerment of the few, something that absolutely must change.

Yesterday was Good Friday. A day when we remember the cruel and appalling death of a man who claimed to be the Son of God. A man who touched the untouchables, healed the sick, gave dignity to prostitutes and embraced the dying. A man who set a trajectory for the equality of women and the rightful honour children should receive. A man who welcomed strangers and prioritised the poor. A man who dared to say to religious powers that God is not far away and unknowable; and to political leaders that top-down dominating hierarchy is only based on fear and control. A man who in essence gave us the foundations for true democracy (as Robert Schuman says), where we do not seek that which is best for ourselves, motivated by self-preservation; no, we learn to embrace the ‘other’ and show brotherly and sisterly love to all.

The cross is not about the need of an angry Sovereign God to be appeased, but rather the love of God utterly dismantling humanity’s understanding of what it means to be sovereign. So much therefore for ‘Sovereign decisions’ that disregard the need of our fellow humans. So much for the desire to be self-ruling and governing.

In our household today, we have been thinking together about all that Jesus took upon himself on the cross. Not just our own ‘Sovereign’ ways of behaving with a capital S, the thoughts and actions that demonstrate our own need to be in charge, but the things we do as humanity collectively that bring such destruction to ourselves, our relationships and the world we live in. We wrote many things down on scraps of paper and pinned them to a wooden cross (words like selfishness, greed, the arms trade, nuclear weapons, starvation in a world of plenty etc). And then we burnt the whole thing, representing to us the way that his love consumes and overcomes all of these things. It is finished. That old understanding of Sovereignty is done with. True sovereignty is to walk in the way of uncontrolling love (Jay Thomas Oord) and has nothing to do with violence, debt, control, power games or self-preservation.

When christians speak of the ‘Sovereignty of God’, we must be careful to understand what we mean. God is not sovereign in the way humanity classically attributes sovereignty. His sovereignty is of a completely different order. The word sovereign is unhelpful when thinking about God. It attributes all kinds of disturbing characteristics that do not belong to him at all. We must find better language that is not entangled with such confusion, or alternatively allow the word ‘sovereignty’ to be entirely redefined.
And so, when we want to make our own individual ‘sovereign’ decisions, or as a nation wish to do so collectively, we could perhaps think more carefully about what will happen when we act in a ‘sovereign’ dimension toward others….As english people, we are going to struggle with our own sense of sovereignty, because we have had the biggest empire in the world and have a long history of grand monarchy. At Easter, we could do worse than to reflect on the humility and grace of the cross and allow our hunger for autocracy to be utterly undone.

Michael Sheen wrote a brilliant article in the New Statesman this last week (https://t.co/64vmmjC0if), asking some serious questions of the Labour Party. Here is my personal view about where new hope can be found for the political left (not that labour necessarily represent that anymore…..)

So yesterday was BBC Democracy Day. Maybe it was a wistful longing for what might have been. Democracy? The rule/power of the people in a day when the richest 1% own 99% of the world’s wealth? When the 50 richest corporations now hold more wealth than the 50 richest nation states? When we hear of unbelievable governmental cover-ups across Europe? When the vox populi is increasingly silenced and the powerful elite rule through a feudalistic system of land ownership and the ‘rights’ to resources.

Democracy is only a veneer. It is the icing on a cake, which is mouldy to its middle. It is, as my friend Roger Mitchell so clearly highlights, just enough multiplied sovereignty to make us believe we have power when in fact we have very little. Rather, we have an increasingly oppressive and sinister system of domination and control, held together through a strong alliance of economic debt, military violence and law (truly enforced by the State of Exception – Giorgio Agamben).

And we are waking up to this. This is why we see the political turmoil stirring throughout Europe. And the politicians cannot understand it. There is no doubt, that we will see a kick back and a reaction towards the extremes of left and right. But this is not the answer.

I quite admire the Australian system in that they have to vote. But I especially like the option to vote for ‘none of the above’. I don’t hold hope in any of the political parties, because the system itself is utterly broken, corrupt to its core and does not serve the future of humanity and the planet.

But if we do see a shaking, and the political systems we have known become shattered and changed, with a new type of economics coming to the fore, what is it that we can imagine? With power comes responsibility. What would we dream of and what would we do differently? How would we stop exactly the same thing happening again or stop our selfish motivations from plummeting us into war? What would be our ‘new politics’?

There are some exciting conversations emerging. We do not have to spiral into years of violence and war. A revolution of love is possible. I believe it is in the very heart of God for human beings to love one another and to prefer each others needs. To embrace and to be changed by ‘the other’. Our current politics is one based on fear. Fear of the other. Fear of lack. But love drives out fear and those who live in love, live in God. Fear enslaves us but love sets us free.

Maybe we will see a ‘kenocracy’ emerge? A rule of love? To find this would be to align ourselves with the story of God through the ages. Love poured out for others, daring to embrace those different from ourselves and together finding hope and peace. Fear enslaves us but love sets us free.

Have a read of ‘Discovering Kenarchy’ – available from amazon. Once our imaginations are alive with possibility, nothing is impossible.